Featured Domains

VeriSign has released its latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief. Here are the latest stats, according to VeriSign and Zooknic:

– Last year ended with over 225 million domains registered across all top level domains
– Registrations have grown by more than 20.4 million, or 10 percent, since the fourth quarter of 2010
– Country code domains are growing at an even faster clip, with 13.2 percent increase year over year
– The largest TLDs remain (in order): .com, .de (Germany), .net, .uk (United Kingdom), .org, .info, .tk
(Tokelau), .nl (Netherlands), .ru (Russian Federation) and .eu (European Union).

The report also talks about the dangers of domain hijacking. Although this was mostly a sales pitch for VeriSign’s security tools (which are offered through registrars), it’s good to have more focus on this.

VeriSign discussed how domain thieves quickly transfer domains — “laundering”, it calls it — to make it more difficult to recover your domain:

Making matters worse, depending on the sophistication of the attacker, domain name hijacking can be extremely difficult to reverse as hijacked registrations are often “launderedâ€ through a series of different registrars and registrants in an effort to make it more difficult for the rightful registrant to reverse the fraud. How effective this tactic is depends somewhat on how vigilant the victim is about monitoring their domain name. But in spite of vigilant monitoring, attackers can be very cunning, leaving email and name server records untouched until they have passed a hijacked domain through several transfers.